IKEA doubles down on Matter
IKEA is accelerating its smart‑home push by making its new lineup Matter‑compatible, meaning its devices are designed to work across Alexa, Siri and Google’s ecosystems instead of locking you into one platform. ( ) The brand has also expanded into a new range of speakers and practical WFH improvements, signaling it wants to be the affordable, interoperable backbone for everyday smart homes rather than a closed budget option. ( )
IKEA is trying to fix one of smart home tech’s oldest annoyances: buying a bulb or sensor and then discovering it only plays nicely with one company’s app. Its next wave of devices is built around Matter, the industry standard meant to let the same gadget work across Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and other systems. (ikea.com) IKEA started laying the groundwork on September 11, 2024, when it updated its DIRIGERA hub to act as a Matter Bridge. That let older IKEA Zigbee devices, including lights, sensors, remotes, air purifiers, and speakers, show up inside other Matter-compatible platforms instead of staying trapped inside IKEA’s own setup. (ikea.com) Then on July 9, 2025, IKEA said it would launch more than 20 new smart products in January 2026, all built to work with Matter from the start. The company also said DIRIGERA had become a Matter Controller, which means the hub can manage Matter devices from other brands inside the IKEA Home smart app, not just IKEA gear. (ikea.com) That is a bigger shift than it sounds. A Matter Bridge is like a translator that helps your old devices speak to the outside world, while a Matter Controller is the traffic cop that can actually add and manage devices from multiple brands in one place. (ikea.com, ikea.com) The first products now hitting stores show how aggressively IKEA is pricing this push. On April 1, 2026, 9to5Google reported IKEA launching new Matter lights and sensors alongside a KALLSUP Bluetooth speaker priced at about $10 that can be grouped into a home audio network. (9to5google.com) IKEA is not treating this as a bulbs-and-plugs side project. In its July 2025 announcement, it paired the Matter rollout with two new speakers, including the NATTBAD Bluetooth speaker in July and the BLOMPRAKT table speaker with lighting in October, which shows the company wants home tech to look like furniture instead of black plastic boxes. (ikea.com) That design angle is familiar IKEA territory, but the interoperability angle is newer. Wired’s hands-on report says the company is moving away from the old model where budget smart home gear often meant compromises on compatibility, and toward devices that can slot into the assistant people already use. (wired.com) There is still one catch: “universal” does not always mean “hub-free.” IKEA’s own 2025 announcement says a compatible hub such as DIRIGERA is required to add Matter-enabled products to a home setup, and newer coverage has noted that some of the cheapest sensors stop looking quite so cheap once you add a $109 hub. (ikea.com, tech.yahoo.com) So IKEA’s bet is not that people want a fully IKEA home. The bet is that a renter can buy an $8 plug, a $10 speaker, a few lights, and one hub, then have all of it work with the voice assistant and app they already picked long before they ever walked into an IKEA store. (bestsmartdevice.nl, tech.yahoo.com, ikea.com)
